Many moons

THE WORLD beneath your feet is no more than 20 kilometres across, its gravity so weak that you could ride a bicycle up a ramp and into space. But the view of Saturn is breathtaking. It appears over twice as large in the sky as the full Moon does from Earth, and that's not including its magnificent ring system.

The anonymous rock you're standing on was spotted in early August last year by Brett Gladman, perhaps the most successful moon hunter ever. Based at the Observatory of the Côte d'Azur in southern France, and with a team of collaborators all over the world, Gladman has discovered five new satellites orbiting Uranus, confirmed one orbiting Jupiter, and found no fewer than 12 new moons of Saturnall in the space of a few years. Meanwhile, a team led by David Jewitt of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu has found another 11 ...

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